Instead, according to a recent consumer survey, the vast majority of users simply utilize the “personal assistant” to initiate phone calls and to send text messages. That hardly takes advantage of all the “natural language processing” that Siri promises, but you can see how they would be the most frequently used commands. The irony is that you didn’t need Siri to make phones or dictate text messages; you could already do that with previous iPhone models.

That said, it’s good to see that a solid 87% of iPhone 4S users are taking advantage of Siri at least on a monthly basis. At the same time, 32% never used Siri for music, 35% never used Siri to set a meeting, and 30% have never used Siri to send an e-mail message. Three quarters of users are generally satisfied (or very satisfied) with Siri, with just 9% saying they were unsatisfied. Not bad.

[Source]

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The Voice Actions in Android currently do more than just do searches on Google. It can be used to make phone calls and such, but Google wants to beef it up to do even more, challenging Siri for the throne of most useful voice assistant. The service that previously went by the codename “Majel” will have three main goals, all of which are designed to “go beyond Siri’s functionality.”

First, they want Assistant “to put the world’s knowledge into a format a computer can understand, to create a personalization layer and to build a mobile, voice-controlled “do engine” that will help users accomplishing real-life goals.” It’s like taking IBM’s Watson, making him cater to the individual user, and getting him to understand what we’re saying, acting on those instructions to really achieve something.

Chalk this up to rumor for now, but it looks like Google Assistant could be ready for deployment by the end of this year. Better still, Google will likely have an API that will open up the service to developers. Who knows what cool functions this could yield?

[ source]

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Ever wanted to see a showdown between voice assistants? You can do just that by taking a peek at the video (posted below) which has been released by Motorola. It shows the duel between Siri on the iPhone 4S and Google Voice Actions on the Droid RAZR.

The reason behind Droid Razr’s better performance might be the device’s LTE connectivity. As you might know, an internet connection is needed for both the voice command systems to function. A remote server processes the voice commands that you give and sends the “translated” commands back to your device. The faster the connection, the better the performance will be. But we are unable to tell whether the devices in the video are having good coverage because of the clip’s low resolution.

We do know that both the voice assistants are doing a good job. The difference is that Siri is taking a bit more time to execute commands and also pulls up Google search instead of the Motorola website in the last test. But that’s not so bad, right? And we wonder how Siri’s sister will perform in a similar combat.

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Voice actions have arrived for Android smartphones.  Google’s latest integration of seamlessly simple solutions has brought about the new feature which allows Android users to simply speak the command.

Google’s software does all the work, connecting you to websites, people and places.  Here’s how it works: “To use Voice Actions, tap the microphone button on the Google search box on your home screen, or press down for a few seconds on the physical search button on your phone to activate the “Speak Now” screen.”

Here is an example of a command: navigating to the local Best Buy by saying “Navigate to Best buy”, and your navigation app will give you the directions to take you there.

A second example would be texting a friend by saying their name and then the message “send text to Steve Jobs, how ya like me now?”

A third example could be listening to a song or finding music on your phone, “listen to Broken Bells”

It’s just that simple.  The software for Android 2.2 has the following commands built in:

• send text to [contact] [message]
• listen to [artist/song/album]
• call [business]
• call [contact]
• send email to [contact] [message]
• go to [website]
• note to self [note]
• navigate to [location/business name]
• directions to [location/business name]
• map of [location]

The next step would be to allow for user-configurable voice actions, until now you will have to make do with a pretty good array of commands from Google. Unfortunately, “teleport me” commands still do not work.

A great hands-on video from Gizmodo showing more realistic processing times.

Mouth On With Android’s Voice Actions (Verdict: It’s Great) [Gizmodo]
Just speak it: introducing Voice Actions for Android [Google]

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